In order to communicate with the laptop, an infrared USB dongle has to be attached. With a range of 15ft, this dongle includes a small scroll wheel that allows the 3D depth setting to be adjusted on-the-fly. The laptop comes preloaded with all the necessary 3D software, but you won’t start experiencing 3D until a compatible application or game is launched.
The USB dongle links up with the glasses with infrared
One problem with the polarised 3D method on Acer’s laptop is that the resolution gets split in two, with each eye seeing alternate horizontal lines. This results in a loss of detail and causes particular problems when trying to read small text. On the G51J 3D, however, each eye sees all 1,366 lines of the laptop’s display.
As soon as a suitable program is fired up the glasses take on a dimmed effect, caused by each eyepiece rapidly switching on and off. This process is timed to coincide with the display’s refresh rate, meaning each eye sees alternate frames. On standard laptop displays, which usually run at 60Hz, this would mean the refresh rate effectively halving to 30fps. By using a 120Hz display, the G51J 3D is able to provide up to 60fps for each eye when running in 3D mode.
Naturally, content designed specifically for 3D works best. It came as no surprise that the Nvdia test screen provided a real knock-your-socks-off 3D experience, with the revolving Nvidia logo really leaping out from the screen.
The quality of 3D gaming depends on the title you’re playing. Nvidia’s trawled through over 350 games and rated them as to their 3D performance: Excellent, Good, Fair and Not Recommended. When firing up a game, a screen pops up explaining what settings, if any, should be altered in order to get the game running at its best. A full list of compatible titles can be found on Nvidia’s 3D Vision website.
Run a game in 3D and you’ll be told what settings to adjust
Unlike with the Acer, which had viewing angles restricted due to the polarised glasses, you don’t need to worry about your positioning in relation to the display. However, the shuttering nature of the glasses means everything appears a lot dimmer. Although not a problem with most games, those with darker scenes can cause problems.
COMMENTS
nice, but i hope things improve from this...
Particularly, I like how the shutterspecs have a non-laughable framerate now - but as one who was close to offering celebratory sacrifices to whichever small god was responsible when flickeriffic CRTs were washed away by rock steady LCDs, I hope we can re-double that. Anything much below 85Hz makes my eyes and head hurt after a while, and sub-72Hz is nasty. My only, thankfully brief encounters with 56Hz original SVGA were battles against near-unreadable text (monitor phosphors have FAR shorter persistance times than 50Hz TVs) and the 60Hz default was a bane.
No, it's not one of these stupid "powerline fields cook my brain" claims. Set me up a CRT and I will have a fairly good chance of guessing what the refresh rate is if it's between 37i and 75p. The flickering is visible and eventually causes irritation, much like the also-detectable 15.6kHz whistle from a TV tube. However there is an upper limit to what even the most hyperactive rods & cones will detect before their nerve impulses reach 100% duty cycle and the output is considered as "steady". Even with it right up against the eye (making the whole world flicker!) instead of only being a relatively small, distant screen, 120Hz Per Eye should do the trick. We have 200Hz TVs now, allegedly, for whatever good they're supposed to give against a 100Hz (or 50Hz 2D LCD), so it can't be impossible.
By the way, what causes the framerate to drop so? Is it because it's having to render two seperate scenes but not flip the buffer for either of them (except flipping between L & R of course) until both are updated to prevent mind-warping 3-dimensional "tearing"? Like, a 3D Vblank? If they're not doing this, then I see no reason why simply jittering the POV position left and right by a few inches for each drawn frame and dropping the result into a different buffer should be difficult.
Suppose what we need is some kind of SLI-type setup that can offer a reasonable guarantee of maintaining 60fps for each eye to keep up the illusion... well so long as you keep the detail levels down ;)
Finally why do we need to wait for special software to support this concept? Descent, Terra Nova and a few others have been supporting shutterspecs and other true-3D render methods since the mid 90s (ever since fully shaded & textured polys became a practical prospect) and the guys selling the devices allegedly had go-between drivers for a variety of other titles to retroactively enable it. Can't we do similar now? And where, goddammit, is my 3D, HD-movie-capturing digital camera?
External IR emitter?
Has Will asked Asus why the IR emitter for the glasses isn't integrated into the lid?
BTW, the alternating shutter glasses effectively have the fps of the display, as the odd-numbered frames display the left image, and the even-numbered the right.
